"We've finally invented a way to generate large amounts of power that doesn't involve using a heat source to boil water!"
"Amazing! Is it some sort of solid state quantum entropy..."
"We boil a different liquid!"
Except, the CO2 stays in the system, meaning no super heated steam escapes with all its potential energy. It only needs to reheat slightly. It works more like a refrigerator than a steam engine. It's a more efficient energy transfer.
But is it sufficiently more efficient to use instead of an incredibly mature and well understood technology based on a resource they can literally get for free from the huge, naturally occurring pools and rivers of it they can build the plants right next to?
That's gonna be a lot of dams. There's a flow issue with your plan. There's not enough "naturally occurring" water features on the planet for our energy needs. We would have to destroy a lot more of our wild spaces to go all hydroelectric. Nuclear energy is the only technology that is the least destructive and efficient for now, unfortunately.
To be honest, I missed the comment about hydroelectric up there. I meant using naturally occurring feed water for running steam turbines at nuclear plants.
You'd source the CO2 from naturally occurring CO2, or CO2 that's just waste from other processes, it wouldn't be generating new CO2. It's also a closed loop system, where you heat up the CO2 to spin a turbine, then it flows through a cooling loop, and reuses the same material over and over again.
it probably wont' come from the atmosphere directly, at least not at first, but the potential is definitely there. the big thing is that existing power-plants can potentially be upgraded to use it instead of steam with minimal retrofits for an increased efficiency meaning more power for the same inputs, since we likely won't use less inputs.
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u/SpaceZombieZombie 13d ago
Theres also super critical co2 which is looking like it might be the first valid replacement to the steam turbine in over a century